I sure hope my school and early career days in Texas pay off in health, if not wealth. Its billionaires just do not believing in retiring.

There's Boone Pickens, now 80, having made his fortune in "awl" now crusading for wind power. Ross Perot, now 78, years removed from EDS still railing against national debt.

So why expect less from the "younger generation" of its billionaires? Michael, now 43, back in the saddle at Dell. Mark Cuban, 50, years removed from Broadcast.com and Bubble 1.0, leads a hyper acting, blogging life and is chasing after the Chicago Cubs and more.

To many bloggers, PR has become synonymous with spam. Last week the
Enterprise Irregulars had a discussion with 95% of comments negative on PR -
mostly about how it is still one way, controlled messaging, and not facilitating
conversations. How it is often irrelevant to areas we cover. Bad enough that
one of the EIs Anshu Sharma started a new blog Your
PR sucks

Well, this post is about 2 recent more positive episodes - in both cases I have
initiated the conversation. And importantly, the conversations have been about disagreeing with the vendor's CEO and in the other, a discussion of its competition.

Within a few minutes Josh replied: "Thanks for the heads up, though you won’t
be surprised to know we did see your blog already, and yes, we will be able to
provide a statement from Harry in reply, so stay tuned."

In normal PR one-way traffic style, I had expected silence in return.
Especially since I took an opposing view to Harry's. Not sure Harry will
respond, but I appreciate the fact Josh has requested he does.

I then asked her for a favor. My wife wants to use her favorite
Plantronics headset designed for the landline with a cell phone. Most cell
phones either support a Bluetooth headset or a speakerphone. What we want is a
bluetooth dog tag or pendant which allows to plug in the Plantronic. And by the way its needs
to support a 2.5 mm, not the standard 3.5 mm outlet.

I posed her the question - would
BlueAnt engineers have a clue if such a product existed in the market. BlueAnt
does not have such a product and could have politely said so, and ended the
conversation.

But they went through a few rounds of suggestions about Jabra and other
competing products. Through all this, Lauran acted as the conduit. BlueAnt is
based in Australia, and she endured the latency in the conversation back and
forth.

She need not have, but she did, and we may have found a solution. Within the
Plantronics family.

Josh encouraging his client to converse on a not-agreeable blog post. Lauran
encouraging a conversation even around competitive products. Small moves towards
PR 2.0.

During his stint in office President Bill Clinton was accused of having mastered "monocular weeping" - the one with tears in just one eye. But the Democratic convention this week seemed to bring out genuine, two eyed tears every night.

Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama on first night. Hillary Clinton supporters on the second night. Joe Biden's son as he introduced him.

Crying all the way to the bank, er White House?

Then there is news the Republican convention will be dampened by and may be even delayed by Hurricane Gustav

All these years, I have misinterpreted the expression that conventions are supposed to be about big Parties....

For the last few years SAP and Oracle have provided a series of entertaining "who is more black" episodes. And while they mock each other, SaaS vendors have continued to flourish, and newer categories of social media and vertical vendors have emerged. And corporations have tipped the buy/build equilibrium back towards custom build.

But now, as Ben Worthen points out, IBM/HP may become the new Pot/Kettle: " IBM will upsell even more services, Svinte wrote in his email. He
rattles off a laundry list of acronyms and buzz words like Managed
Business Process Outsourcing that he says IBM offers and H-P doesn’t."

Hush - don't tell either they only have 15% services market share between themselves. As with SAP and Oracle, let innovation happen elsewhere - as in cloud computing. And don't tell them CIOs have started to hire more and build more internal capability.

But don't tell them so we can look forward to entertaining comments from both.

I better line up other translations for Pot-Kettle having used the German, French, Spanish and Hungarian ones for the SAP-Oracle series :)

Cisco is acquiring PostPath - a Linux based messaging product. PostPath claims a 1:5 cost advantage against MS Exchange. But to me it should be going after hosted mail or outsourced Exchange.

Especially if it can support 1 GB mailboxes for users. Most outsourced arrangements today barely support 200 mb. And cost companies anywhere from $ 5 to 15 a mailbox a month. For the sample configuration of 2,000 users they use in their comparison to Exchange, the break even of buy versus outsource should be reached in the matter of a few months.

"I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the
last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been
preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways,
airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal
detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones."